Startup Roundup: Milestones, funding and launches

Startup roundup: Hootsuite, Vidyard, Xtreme Labs celebrate milestones

In FP Tech Desk’s Startup Roundup series, we take a look at Canadian startup news from the past week.

Milestones

It was a week of milestones for several Canadian startups.

Starting on the west coast, there are now 5 million users on Hootsuite’s social media management platform, the Vancouver startup said on Thursday, adding that those users have sent 1.3 billion messages.

The company, which was one of the OMERS Ventures fund’s first big investments with a $20-million capital infusion in March, now has 230 employees and has been adding new features to its platform regularly. It also opened an office in London.

Maybe it’s the healthy work environment that’s making everyone there so productive. In a blog post to celebrate the 5 million user mark, the company revealed that it has 15 “office dogs.” Jealous.

Over in Kitchener, Ont., Vidyard is now getting 1 million hits per day on its web-video platform that makes it easy for companies to post videos on their own websites.

Related

CEO Michael Litt said in a blog post that it took the company from September 2011 to April 2012 (about six months) to get to 1 million hits total — an event the team celebrated with cake at the time. Now they’re seeing that many every day.

Finally, in Toronto, Xtreme Labs — which recently received a major investment from Facebook vice-president and founder of the Social+Capital Partnership VC fund Chamath Palihapitiya — is celebrating its five-year birthday throughout November.

The company, which makes mobile and tablet apps for major corporate clients, now has a team of 150 engineers, which is basically a wealth of riches in the increasingly competitive mobile development space.

Funding

Meanwhile, some other Canadian entrepreneurs were busy signing off on the paperwork on funding deals this week.
Starting in Vancouver once again, Pug Pharm Productions Inc. – which offers a customer engagement platform — said it closed a $1-million series A round led by Goal Holdings Group, a venture capital fund also based in Vancouver.

Ottawa’s Privacy Analytics raised an undisclosed amount from the BDC IT Venture Fund and the Capital Angel Network. The company focuses on protecting personal data that its clients collect for analysis and research, working with research, pharma and healthcare businesses to remove identifying information from records.

In e-commerce news, Loose Button, the Toronto company behind Luxe Box, which delivers a pretty box of high-end sample-size beauty products to subscribers every month, is expanding into apparel with the launch of Pink Beryl that will send customers two pairs of tights for a flat monthly price.